Parents’ Nightmare: Futile Race to Stop Killings

A memorial service for the victims of the deadly shooting rampage on Sunday evening at St. Mark's University Parish in Isla Vista, Calif.

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A memorial service for the victims of the deadly shooting rampage on Sunday evening at St. Mark's University Parish in Isla Vista, Calif.

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Elliot O. Rodger, a college student who posted videos about his anger against women for rejecting him, was found dead with a bullet wound to his head on Friday after a killing spree in which six others were fatally shot. A young woman walked to the Delta Delta Delta house, a sorority in Isla Vista, Calif., that lost two of its members in the shooting.

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A makeshift memorial in front of the Alpha Phi sorority house where two women from the Delta Delta Delta sorority house were killed.

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Parishioners at St. Mark’s University Parish in Isla Vista, Calif., during a sermon by The Rev. Art Najera, who spoke about the shootings.

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A sign on the door of the Alpha Phi sorority house.

“I do not know why you girls aren’t attracted to me,” Mr. Rodger said in a video, “but I will punish you all for it.”

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Student security guards from the University of California, Santa Barbara, monitored the front of the Alpha Phi sorority house.

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Flowers were placed in bullet holes in the window of the I.V. Deli Mart in Isla Vista, Calif., one of many crime scenes during the shooting spree.

It was Friday evening when the parents of Elliot O. Rodger clicked open the 140-page manifesto emailed to them from their son and learned of his plans for mass murder and suicide. Frightened and alarmed, they called 911 and then raced to Isla Vista, Calif., in separate cars from Los Angeles, desperate to stop him.

It was too late.

By the time they arrived, Mr. Rodger had killed six people, the police said, and had died of a self-inflicted gunshot — a display of violence that stunned the quiet ocean-side college town.

In truth, Mr. Rodger had been planning his “Day of Retribution,” as he called it in that manifesto, for three years, from the summer day that he moved into a small apartment with two roommates, the first time he lived away from home. He had arrived hoping to escape the sexual rejections that he had raged against through adolescence, but as he simmered at the happy couples walking down the streets, his thoughts turned from starting a new life to exacting revenge.

“I couldn’t believe how wrong everything was turning out,” Mr. Rodger, 22, wrote in the manifesto he sent shortly before stabbing to death three people in his apartment, including his two roommates, whom he described as “repulsive.”

His parents’ frantic trip to Isla Vista was just one missed chance to avert the tragedy. In this case, the parents’ emergency call to the police and their arrival came well after the killing spree was over.

Only weeks earlier, in late April, deputies from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office had stopped by Mr. Rodger’s apartment at the request of state mental health officials, acting on an expression of concern by his mother. They left after a calm and polite Mr. Rodger assured them that there was nothing to worry about. The officers reported that Mr. Rodger was shy and had told them that he was having difficulties in his social life.

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Elliot Rodger, in a photo released by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.CreditMichael Nelson/European Pressphoto Agency

That gave them little ground on which to act, under California law. Because Mr. Rodger was never institutionalized because of his emotional problems, he was able to legally purchase the weaponry he used in the shooting.

Sometime after the police visit, Mr. Rodger — who had already amassed a stockpile of weapons and ammunition in the apartment — added a note to his manifesto: “If they had demanded to search my room that would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over.”

His killing rampage was meticulously laid out, moving from an angry fantasy to a detailed mission over the course of his three years there. Mr. Rodger visited a shooting range for target practice in Oxnard, Calif.; bought three semiautomatic handguns (in case two of them jammed) at different gun stores; and scheduled and postponed the day of reckoning for the most logistical of reasons. At one point, he wanted to do it on Halloween 2013 but pulled back after determining that the police were out in extra force on that night.

“May 24th, 2014 was the final date,” he wrote. “There is no postponing it anymore, no backing out. If I don’t do this, then I only have a future filled with more loneliness and rejection ahead of me, devoid of sex, love, and enjoyment.”

The sheriff’s office identified the three remaining victims on Sunday evening, all students at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The first two were Mr. Rodger’s roommates, Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, and George Chen, 19, both of San Jose, Calif. The third was Weihan Wang, 20, of Fremont, Calif. Two women killed in front of a sorority during Mr. Rodger’s subsequent shooting spree were Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, of Chino Hills, Calif., and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19, of Westlake Village, Calif. The sixth fatal attack was against Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20, of Los Osos, Calif.

Simon Astaire, who described himself as a longtime friend of Mr. Rodger’s parents, who are divorced, said the parents were devastated. ”It’s like everyone’s unbearable nightmare,” he said Sunday.

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The apartment complex in Isla Vista, Calif., where Mr. Rodger lived and where three people were found stabbed to death on Friday.CreditEmily Berl for The New York Times

He said Mr. Rodger’s mother, Li Chin, opened the email from her son at 9:17 p.m. Friday, about 10 minutes before the shooting started, after getting an alarmed call from Mr. Rodger’s therapist. Mr. Astaire said she read the first four lines and went to Mr. Rodger’s YouTube page, where she found a video pledging retribution that had been posted the day before.

Mr. Astaire said she called Peter Rodger, her ex-husband — who was at dinner with his new wife and two friends in Los Angeles — and then called 911. The two parents both began racing to Isla Vista, which is about 13 miles from downtown Santa Barbara, arriving to learn of the killing spree, Mr. Astaire said.

By many accounts, Elliot Rodger had a long history of unusual behavior. Chris Pollard, 22, a neighbor in the Isla Vista apartment building, said he had been rebuffed as he tried to encourage Mr. Rodger to socialize with other residents in the building.

“He just sat and was nonresponsive,” Mr. Pollard said. “Any time anybody tried to get him involved, he just seemed like he didn’t want to be involved. He looked like he became gradually more frustrated or bored, and then eventually he would just get up and go inside.”

He recounted seeing Mr. Rodger come home, bloodied and beaten, after an encounter at a bar. Mr. Rodger, in his manifesto, said he had begun trying to push women over a ledge at the bar, sparking the fight that led to several men beating him up.

Mr. Pollard said it had taken hours to calm Mr. Rodger, as he fumed about the men who had attacked him. “He started saying: ‘I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill myself,’ ” he said.

On Friday afternoon, before the violence began, Mr. Rodger approached Giovanni’s Pizza, up the street from his apartment. Ally Kubie, 20, who was working behind the counter, said he had stood on the patio, barely moving as he stared at her through the glass, a smile fixed on his face.

“I asked, ‘Do you need help?’ ” Ms. Kubie said. “But he just stared at me. It was creepy.”

Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County, speaking Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS, recounted how deputies had visited Mr. Rodger in April and found that he appeared calm and lucid and did not meet the criteria, in the view of his deputies, by which he might have been taken in for observation.

Because of that, they also had no grounds for searching Mr. Rodger’s apartment, where he had already stockpiled his weapons and ammunition, including a Glock 34 and a Sig Sauer P226.

“And obviously, looking back on this, it’s a very tragic situation, and we certainly, you know, wish that we could turn the clock back and maybe change some things,” he said.

Mr. Rodger related the same anecdote with relief, saying he thought his plan was about to be foiled when he found seven deputies at his door. “As soon as I saw those cops, the biggest fear I had ever felt in my life overcame me,” he wrote. “I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it.

“If that was the case, the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, along with my writings about what I plan to do with them,” he wrote. “I would have been thrown in jail, denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. I can’t imagine a hell darker than that.”

The plan that he carried out on Friday indeed was close to what he had written about. “The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber,” he wrote. Police said they believed the third person he stabbed there was a visitor.

He said his next phase would be head to the Alpha Phi sorority, to kill women there. Once he arrived there, he pounded on the door but was denied entrance; he shot three women outside, two fatally. From there, he said, he planned to drive the streets “splattering as many enemies as I can with my SUV” and shooting at passers-by.

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Isla Vista, Calif.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Parents’ Nightmare: Futile Race to Stop Killings. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe